Humanist Utopia

By Carman Bradley

Evolution is
the development of the energy of the universe in such a way that it has an
increasing ability to consciously control itself and the universe around
it. It is a progressive change from the
unconscious to the conscious. We are
the universe trying to comprehend itself.
Man is the corporeal manifestation of the universe trying to control its
own destiny. Man is God in the process
of coming into existence.[i]

Eugenics
Manifesto

‘When you make
the two one, and when you make the inmost as the outermost and the outer as the
inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and female into a
single unity, so that the male will not be only male and the female will not be only female, when you create
eyes in the place of an eye, and create a hand in the place of a hand, and a
foot in the place of a foot, and also an image in the place of an image, then
surely will you enter the kingdom.’ (Gnostic gospel, Thomas 22)[ii]

Tertullian long ago, before
modern investigation gathered together the numerous groups and movements of the
heresy of the period under the general designation ‘gnosis’, had grasped their
essential elements. For him Gnosis is a ‘declining syncretism’ such as the
natural spirituality of mankind loves, a spiritual and idealistic overestimate
of the self which blurs the fixed limits that separate the creature from the
deity; and it is at the same time the ‘nihilistic’ hostility against God of
reality who has created the world and has revealed himself concretely in the flesh.[iii]

Kurt Rudolph, Professor – History of
Religion

This article gives further insight into a world void of
the Holy Spirit and God-fearing people; a potential civilization run on the
philosophy of humanism. Imagine the
world in a global genetics and cloning race, fulfilling Margaret Sanger’s
wildest eugenics dream.

The concept of gene therapy is so inherently simple,
says Kevin Davies, that it is hard to believe that it will thwart researchers
much longer. If the technology does
become successful, there will be those who will advocate using gene therapy to
modify genes in the germ-line (sperm and egg cells) so the errant gene can be
prevented from being passed down to future generations. Some scientists even harbor dreams of
enhancing memory or postponing aging.[iv] These intentions to alter our natural gene
pool have “boundary” implications with the baby; surrogate mother; biological
parents; actual parents; society, subsequent generations; and also with
medical, religious and other social institutions.Thinking of such
scientific prospects a few scientists offer their comments.

James
Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, says:

Dare we be entrusted with
improving upon the results of several million years of Darwinian natural
selection? Are human germ cells
Rubicons that geneticists may never cross?
Yes [do not cross] [v]

Eric Lander, director of the American Genome Center
at the Whitehead Institute, warns against germ-line intervention:

One reason is
the dire possibility of something going awry.
The prospect of a ‘product recall’ from the human gene pool is too
surreal to contemplate.[vi]

Kevin Davies, author of Cracking the Genome, also writes against germ-line intervention:

Another reason
is that we will never know what we might miss.
Some of the most famous figures in history suffered serious genetic
diseases: Abraham Lincoln had Marfan’s syndrome, Van Gogh epilepsy, Albert
Einstein dyslexia, Lou Gehrig and Stephen Hawking amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis…[vii]

Cautious as Watson, Lander and Davies may be, their
opinions are not entirely representative of the “science community” and their
views do not fully assess the potential mankind has for using science for
selfish and ultimately evil purposes.
It only takes one obsessive zealous researcher to alter forever human
evolution. And in an essay titled
“What’s Wrong With Cloning?” Richard Dawkins beckons for the research:

‘But do you
whisper to yourself a secret confession?
Wouldn’t you love to be cloned?’…

‘I find it a
personally riveting thought that I could watch a small copy of myself, 50 years
younger.’[viii] ‘My
feeling is founded on pure curiosity.’[ix]

The International Academy of Humanists proclaims:

The potential
benefits of cloning may be so immense that it would be a tragedy if ancient
theological scruples should lead to a Luddite rejection of cloning.[x]

Steen Willadsen, representing the British
Agricultural Research Council states:

The role of
the scientist is to break the laws of nature, rather than to establish, let
alone accept them.[xi]

As a humanist, evolutionist and hierarchical
reductionist, Dawkins has little reservation about experimenting with
creation. He prefers to follow the laws
of physics and atheism:

There is no
reason to think that the laws of physics are violated in living matter. There is nothing supernatural, no ‘life
force’ to rival the fundamental forces of physics.[xii]

In human life, start to finish, as Dawkins proclaims,
there appears to be essentially no breach in the application of the laws of physics
as commonly understood. However, many
things appear to happen outside the boundaries of physics, in the time period
between conception and death, which are unique, distinctive, measurable and of
no small influence. Human life is a
phenomenon inseparable from magnetism, gravity and chemical-molecular
processes, but in experience is so much more.
We have virtually no personal consciousness of the minute-to-minute
functioning of our organs or our various involuntary bodily systems and we are
not self-aware of how we see and think.
Neither do we normally have consciousness of the molecular, cellular and
atomic level events occurring in our bodies.
The physics of these things are usually the assumed in life, after which
any description of one’s life would tend to reveal measurements of experiences
such as joy-depression, pleasure-pain, company-loneliness, hope-despair,
evil-goodness; and descriptions of character and beauty. When Dawkins contends there is nothing
supernatural, no “life force” to rival the forces of physics he speaks of a
self-constrained and very shallow, indeed hollow, view of life.

Steve Grand, author of Creation: Life and How To Make It, observes that our division of
the world into the categories “living” and “non-living” seems to be one of the
most fundamental judgments we make.[xiii] We treat each category in very different
ways. Our application of morals and
concepts of “right” and “wrong” are only applicable to living things. Says Grand, “We never accuse an avalanche of
being a murderer, and we never campaign for the rights of hurricanes.” However, the more we reduce our biology to
“inanimate” laws of physics, the closer we come to classifying mankind’s
existence as purposeless as the avalanche.
Grand asks, “If life is reduced to mere clockwork, where does that leave
our sense of morality?“ In responding
to this question, he writes:

In fact, as
life has indeed begun to be reduced to clockwork, and especially as we have
gained mastery over that clockwork, so has our moral certainty declined. Today we face difficult moral
judgments...Life is not made of atoms, it is merely built out of them. What life is actually ‘made of’ is cycles of
cause and effect, loops of causal flow.
These phenomena are just as real as atoms – perhaps even more real. If anything the entire universe is actually
made from events, of which atoms are merely some of the consequences.[xiv]

The reason why
we esteem the material world more than we do the intangible one is fairly
obvious – it is the world that our senses tell us is really out ‘there.’…On the
other hand, we do not have any direct sensory confirmation of intangible
things. We don’t have poverty sensors,
we cannot touch a society, and our only evidence for the existence of other
people’s minds is the visible or auditable motion of their physical
bodies. Consequently, we come to
believe that the things we can directly sense are real, while the things we
cannot sense are more like figments of our imagination or convenient labels,
rather than about anything absolute, independent and genuine.

And yet
despite all this, the things we really care about are largely intangible. ‘Life’ is an intangible concept, as is
‘mind.’ We care about suffering in a
way that we never do about mass. This
has led to some strange and almost perverse logic errors in the past.[xv]

When sacred human life begins in the humanist
paradigm is one of these perverse logic errors. It is toward this intangible, and therefore, highly unscientific
notion called “life,” that we must turn our attention. Against a cultural background of
postmodernity - individualism, liberalism, materialism and secularism - we must
examine the idea of a utopian humanistic civilization. We must ask, where the ethical boundary lies
separating the Josef Mengeles’ from the Louis Pasteurs, in helping the species
achieve perfection? Where is the
boundary protecting vulnerable human life from the powerful?

Ian Wilmut, an embryologist with impeccable
credentials, was fifty-two years old when the cloned sheep Dolly was born. Gina Kolata writes:

By the time of
Dolly, he had worked at the Roslin Institute for twenty-three years, laboring
for nine hours a day, leaving the lab at six each night and, more often than
not, bringing work home. The cloning
work was long and tedious. It required
infinite patience and an ability to work long hours hunched over a microscope
in a tiny room heated to the internal temperature of a sheep.[xvi]

Wilmut entered Darwin College in Cambridge in 1971
and received a Ph.D. in only two years.
He holds no religious belief
and considers himself an agnostic.
Wilmut says:

I am not a
fool, I know what is bothering people about this. I understand why the world is suddenly at my door. But this is my work. It has always been my work, and it doesn’t
have anything to do with creating copies of human beings. I am not haunted by what I do, if that is
what you want to know. I sleep very
well at night.[xvii]

To clone Dolly, Wilmut used methods his research
group and others had been developing for more than a decade. His colleague Keith Campbell sucked the
nucleus out of an egg that had been removed from a ewe, creating an egg that
had no genes at all, an egg that would soon die if it did not get a new nucleus. Then he began the process of adding the
nucleus of an udder cell to the bereft egg.
Campbell slipped an udder cell under the outer membrane of the egg. Next, he jolted the egg for a few
microseconds with a burst of electricity.
This opened the pores of the egg and the udder cell so that the contents
of the udder cell, including its chromosomes, oozed into the egg and took up
residence there. Now the egg had a
nucleus – the nucleus of an udder cell.
In addition, the electric current tricked the egg into behaving as if it
were newly fertilized, jump-starting it into action. After 277 attempts to clone an udder cell, Wilmut’s group
succeeded and Dolly was created.[xviii]

Perhaps
to Wilmut’s surprise, approximately a half decade later, Brigitte Boisselier,
president of CLONAID, announced the birth of a third baby – a boy, born of a
surrogate mother, in Japan. The DNA for
the baby – she didn’t know his name – was obtained from the dead son of a
couple – whom she refused to identify – after he died 18 months previous in an
accident. Boisselier said the parents
of the dead child who’s DNA was used for the cloning called CLONAID.

“We rushed over there and had time to take cells, to
culture them, to develop them.”[xix] Because the mother was 41 years old, it was
decided that there was a risk of miscarriage and a surrogate mother was chosen
to carry the baby. Boisselier said the
second cloned baby girl, born to a lesbian couple in Holland on January 3,
2003, was doing well. So far none of
the couples had paid for the treatment.
The first 20 cloned babies, according to Boisselier, were being funded
by two investors who were hopeful of being cloned themselves. After the 20th.”[xx] baby, the many
thousands of couples who want cloned babies will be expected to pay. Says Boisselier, “This is how the investors
see this, as a capital risk investment."

A few years before CLONAID’s announcements,
Britain’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, in a joint report with
the Human Genetics Advisory Commission, gave its blessing to the notion that
cloning technology could be employed to culture human tissues that could later
be used for repair. Cells from a person
would be used to create an embryo, as with Dolly; then cells from the young
embryo would be cultured to provide tissue that was genetically identical to
the donor. The embryo itself would of
course be “sacrificed,” but various ethical committees in Britain have broadly
agreed that human embryos up to fourteen days (long before they acquire any
distinctive nervous tissue) have not yet acquired the status of personhood.[xxi] Here Britain’s Human Fertilization and
Embryology Authority, the Human Genetics Advisory Commission, the International
Academy of Humanists, and indeed the pro-abortion movement, are content with a
particular secular-humanist ethical gymnastic.
The cognitive maneuver (perversity to Christians) has been described in
one of two ways.

One approach argues that a zygote is not a human
being, although all human beings were zygotes.
The notion further implies that human embryos are not human beings;
although all human beings were embryos.
This notion of a sub-human
status for what typically occurs in the womb has been argued for the non-rights of the fetus. Therefore the killing of a human zygote,
embryo or fetus is considered ethical.
In writing about ethical and legally valid “informed consent” for stem cell research, Dianne Irving, Ph.D.,
notes that decision-makers: donors, recipients, legislators and voters, need an
explanation of “what” these early human entities are. Here she asks:

Are they
prawns, cabbages, fish, frogs, chickens, monkeys, or human beings? Are they just ‘eggs’ such as those used in
fertilization, skin cells, ‘bunches of stem cells,’ ‘pre-embryos,’ or merely
the earliest stages of ‘the evolving human species?’[xxii]

In answering these questions Irving chooses
to use “absolutely no subjective ‘religious,’ ‘theological,’ ‘political,’ or
‘personal’ opinions.” Rather she sticks
to the objective scientific facts documented by the experts in the field of
human embryology – “the only scientists who have the academic credentials to
answer the question, ‘When do human
beings begin to fully exist?’”
Speaking of sexual human reproduction, Irving states:

Scientifically,
then…there is no question or confusion whatsoever that the immediate product,
and all continuous, contiguous, growth and developmental stages thereafter
through adulthood, involves an already fully existing unique living human
being.[xxiii]

Thus the fusion of the sperm (with 23 chromosomes)
and the oocyte (with 23 chromosomes) at fertilization results in a live human
being, a single-cell human zygote, with 46 chromosomes – the number of
chromosomes characteristic of an individual member of the human species. Irving
draws a similar conclusion about cloning:

Human beings
can also be reproduced a-sexually, without the use of sperm or oocytes – as we
know empirically happens in human monozygotic twinning…Just as the single-cell
organism produced sexually at fertilization is a human being, the single-cell
organism produced a-sexually at cloning is also a human being.[xxiv]

Therefore, this first ethics approach – the
contention of killing the life form while in some “sub-human” biological state
has been debunked and is generally not raised in defense of abortion, genetic
engineering, or cloning.

The second approach concedes that a zygote,
embryo or fetus is truly a human being, hence the ethical grounds for
destroying human life are framed differently - through the hypothesis of “personhood.” Obviously the fetus is biologically human, genetically human and
a distinct member of the species homo sapiens.
So the “personhood” argument has to distinguish between human beings and
persons, must say that embryos are human but not persons, and say that all
persons, but not all humans, are sacred and inviolable. According to Peter
Kreeft the crucial issue is this:

Are there any human beings who are not persons? If
so, killing them might be permissible, like killing warts. But who might these human non-persons
be? Many of the more radical humanist
pro-abortion advocates (Peter Singer) include severely retarded, genetically
deficient and handicapped humans, or very old and sick humans, as non-persons.[xxv]

Margaret Sanger would no doubt
applaud Peter Singer for his views.
Kreeft believes no one ever conceived of this category before the
abortion controversy. It looks very
suspiciously like the category was invented to justify the killing. To humanists the Christian paradigm seems to
confuse the sanctity of life with the greater moral construct - the sanctity of
the person. To the humanist not all
human life is sacred. Not even all
human beings; not all individual members of the human species, are sacred. But all human persons are sacred! According to Kreeft, humanists contend that
the Christian bioethics paradigm:

…commits the intellectual sin of biologism, idolatry
of biology, by defining persons in a merely biological, genetic, material
way. Membership in a biological species
is not morally relevant, not what makes persons sacred and murder wrong.[xxvi]

For the humanist, it seems to be
an obvious mistake to claim that personhood begins abruptly, at conception, for
personhood develops gradually, as a matter of degree. Every one of the characteristics we use to identify personhood
arises and grows gradually rather than suddenly. The Christian seems to be the victim of simplistic,
black-or-white thinking, but reality is full of greys. Potential persons should not be confused
with actual persons. The zygote, embryo or fetus is potentially a person, but it must grow into an actual
person.

Kreeft says there is a common premise hidden behind
all of these life-terminating arguments.
He writes:

It is the
premise of Functionalism: defining a person by his or her functioning or
behavior. But common sense
distinguishes between what one is and what one does, between being and
functioning, thus between "being a person" and "functioning as a
person." One cannot function as a
person without being a person, but one can surely be a person without functioning
as a person. In deep sleep, in coma,
and in early infancy, nearly everyone will admit there are persons, but there
are no specifically human functions such as reasoning, choice, or language. Functioning as a person is a sign and an
effect of being a person. It is because
of what we are, because of our nature or essence or being, that we can and do
function in these ways.[xxvii]

Functionalism
arises with the modern erosion of the family.
Half of our families break up.
But the family is the place where you learn that you are loved not
because of what you do, your function, but because of who you are. What is replacing the family, where we are
valued for our being is the workplace, where we are valued for our functioning.[xxviii]

Where Steve Grand finds the notion of life and its
morality eroded by scientific reductionism, Kreeft sees the old "Sanctity
of Life Ethic" eroded by the new "Quality of Life Ethic,” which
reflects the shift from family and parenting values to increased careerism in
society. Now a human life is judged as
valuable and worth living if and only if the judgers decide that it performs at
a certain level - e.g., a functional I.Q. of 60 or 40; or an ability to relate
to other people; or the prospect of a fairly normal, healthy and pain-free
life. If someone lacks the functional criteria of a "quality" life,
he lacks personhood and the right to life.
It would logically follow that a severely autistic person does not have
enough "quality" in his life to deserve to live, and thus active euthanasia,
or assisted suicide, is justified.

The Functionalism that is the basis of the “Quality
of Life Ethic," which underpins the path to humanistic utopia, is morally
reprehensible for at least three reasons.
Writes Kreeft:

First, it is
degrading, demeaning and destructive to human dignity; it treats persons like
trained dolphins.

Second, it is
elitist; it discriminates against less perfect performers.

Third, it
takes advantage, it is power play, it is might over right rationalized.[xxix]

Kreeft contends, if personhood is only a developing,
gradual thing, then we are never fully persons, because we continue to grow, at
least intellectually and emotionally and spiritually. Albert Schweitzer said, at 70, "I still don't know what I
want to do when I grow up." But if we are only partial persons, then
murder is only partially wrong, and it is less wrong to kill younger, lesser
persons than older ones. If it is more
permissible to kill a fetus than to kill an infant because the fetus is less of
a person, then it is for exactly the same reason more permissible to kill a
seven year old, who has not yet developed his reproductive system or many of
his educational and communications skills, than to kill a 27 year old. This
absurd conclusion follows from defining a person functionally.

For more than a century we have called this mode of
thinking Darwinism – survival of the fittest.
Also called the “Quality of Life Ethic” the concept places no intrinsic
value on human life, rather real value has to be earned and maintained through
demonstrated function (life must have demonstrated utility). Diane Irving, sees the rise of the
“personhood” ethic as dangerous. She
expresses the controversy as follows:

To claim that
these innocent and vulnerable living beings can be used and destroyed in order
to help other human beings – especially when there are viable alternatives,
such as the use of umbilical cord and adult stem cells – is to legislatively
create a subcategory of human beings who may be exploited as a mere commodity
for the use of other human beings – and we’ve been there before. The argument is that some human beings are
not ‘persons,’ and other human beings are ‘persons,’ and is based on a theory
about active ‘functionality,’ rather than on the empirical facts about a
thing’s nature.

Such is the
position of many of those in bioethics, e.g., Peter Singer, Director of Human
Values at Princeton University (Princeton, New Jersey). Singer opines that ‘personhood’ is defined
only by the active exercising of ‘rational attributes’ (e.g., willing,
choosing, knowing, relating to the world around one, etc.) or ‘sentience’
(e.g., the feeling of pain and pleasure)- a
philosophical claim inherently based on passé 17th and 18th
century Cartesian, rationalist, and empiricist philosophical systems.[xxx]…One
reason for their indefensibility is simply that if there are two separate and
different things, such as a ‘mind’ or ‘soul’ thing, and a ‘body’ thing, there
is no possible way to explain any interaction between these two different and
separated things. In philosophical
parlance, this is known as the myth of the ‘mind/body’ split – or
chorismos….Finally, ‘pushing the logic’ of those bioethics definitions of
‘person’ leads to extraordinarily bizarre conclusions – and it would be wise, I
respectfully suggest, not to cement them into legislation. Peter Singer, for example, opines that some
human beings are not ‘persons,’ and some animals are ‘persons.’ Indeed, this is the basis for Singer’s
recent defense of ‘bestiality.’[xxxi] But think about it: if only those who are
actively exercising ‘rational attributes’ and ‘sentience’ are ‘persons,’ then the following list of adult human
beings are not ‘persons,’ and thus not ethically or legally protected as real
‘persons’: Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients, the mentally ill and mentally
retarded, the frail elderly, the emotionally ill, drug addicts and alcoholics,
literally all mentally and physically disabled, - even all of us when we are
sleeping.[xxxii]

Alas the genetic scientist “sleeps well at night”
under a cognitive security blanket,
which says that there is a difference between human beings and human persons -
a proverbial “window of experimental opportunity” in between “being” fully
human and “being” fully a person. Ian
Wilmut describes this totally anti-Christian notion with the curious twist to
the “experimental window”:

Zygotes are
intrinsically more difficult to work with, yet efficiency clearly has to be
much higher, for zygotes are precious commodities…zygotes are transient –
racing to become embryos [and embryos are racing to become babies]– while cells may live and multiply in a culture for many weeks or
months, plenty of time to make the necessary manipulations and to monitor the
results.[xxxiii]
[my insert]

Content in their secular moral judgment, British
law-makers also say that frozen human embryos should not be stored for more
than five years without the express request of the genetic parents.[xxxiv] Many see these laws as calling for
state-sponsored mass abortion. Most fail to recognize the potential for
humanitarian abuses starting in the petrie-dish and ending in our home. Corroborating the notion of a war between
the worldviews, Irving explains that bioethics has two virtually exclusive
paradigms from which to draw moral and ethical conclusions:

Secular
bioethics generally considers the following as ethical: contraception; the use
of abortifacients; prenatal diagnosis with the intent to abort defective
babies; human embryo and human fetal research; abortion; human cloning; the
formation of human chimeras (cross-breeding with other species); human
embtyonic stem cell research; ‘brain birth;’ ‘brain death;’ purely experimental
high risk research with mentally ill; enthanasia; physician-assisted suicide;
living wills documenting consent to just about anything; and, withholding and
withdrawing food and hydration as extraordinary means.[xxxv]

In contrast,
Roman Catholic medical ethics…considers all of these unethical – with the
exception of the use of ‘brain death’ criteria…[xxxvi]

How is it that these two different ethical systems
lead to such opposite and contradictory moral conclusions? The answer is predictable - every ethical
theory has foundational ethical principles; deducing from different world
paradigms necessarily leads to different ethical conclusions. We can now visualize a future civilization,
unfettered by theism and spurred-on by humanism, secularism, libertinism and
hedonism.

For example, at the conference, “Great Issues
of Conscience in Modern Medicine,” held at Dartmouth College in 1960, the
Chairman was Rene Dubois, a scientist at Rockerfeller Institute. Dianne N. Irving writes of his views:

Rene Dubois
called ‘prolongation of the life of aged and ailing persons’ and the saving of
lives of children with genetic defects ‘ the most difficult problem of medical
ethics we are likely to encounter within the next decade…To what extent we can
afford to prolong biological life in individuals who cannot derive either
profit or pleasure from existence, and whose survival creates painful burdens
for the community?...It will be for society to redefine these ethics, if the
problem becomes one that society is no longer willing or able to carry.’ Geneticists worry that the gene pool was
becoming polluted because early death of persons with certain genetic
conditions was now preventable; in addition to antibiotics, insulin for
diabetes and diet for phenelkytonuria were frequently mentioned. A unique
solution was offered by Nobelist Hermann J. Muller, who promoted his concept of
a bank of healthy sperm, together with the ‘new techniques of reproduction’ to
prevent otherwise inevitable degeneration of the race.’[xxxvii]

A similar theme was repeated at the conference
titled, “Man and His Future,” sponsored by the Ciba Foundation in London in
1962. Themes included genetics and
brain science. Of special note were the
similar concerns with evolution, eugenics and population control:

Sir Julian
Huxley opened the conference with a wide-ranging lecture entitled, ‘The Future
of Man – Evolutionary Aspects.’ He
painted a picture of evolution that for the first time had become conscious of
itself in human kind and thus was responsible for its population, economics,
education, and above all, for the exploration of ‘inner space – the realm of
our own minds and the psychometabolic processes at work in it.’ The problems of overpopulation and the
dysgenic effects of progress had to be overcome to assure the realization of
human fulfillment: ‘Eventually, the prospect of radical eugenic improvement could
become one of the mainsprings of man’s evolutionary advance.’ Man was, he triumphantly proclaimed, ‘the
trustee…of advance in the cosmic process of evolution.[xxxviii]

Writes Irving, “scientists took sides for and
against programs of eugenics and thought control.” J.B.S. Haldane described a vision of his own utopia, imagining
the biological possibilities in the next ten thousand years. His utopia included broad control of physiological
and psychological processes, achieved largely by pharmacological and genetic
techniques, including cloning and deliberate provocation of mutations, to suit
the human product for special purposes in the world of the future.[xxxix] At the first Nobel Conference in 1965, named
“Genetics and the Future of Man,” Dr. William Shockley, who had won the Nobel
prize for physics, presented his views on eugenics. According to Irving, he suggested that, since intelligence was
largely genetically determined, serious efforts to improve human intelligence
should be pursued by various means, including sterilization, cloning, and
artificial insemination. He praised
Hermann Muller’s advocacy of sperm banks.[xl]

Bentley Glass, the outgoing president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, echoed similar thoughts in
a speech in December 1970 to the nation’s largest professional association of
scientists. Writes Gina Kolata:

According to
Glass, the looming problem for humanity was a population explosion that would
force people to sharply limit their family sizes. And so, he said, when parents will be able to have no more than
two children, they will want to be sure that those children are perfect. Science, he said, will come to the rescue.

‘No parents in
that future time will have a right to burden society with a malformed or a mentally
incompetent child,’ Glass said. ‘Just
as every child must have the right to full educational opportunity and a sound
nutrition, so every child has the inalienable right to sound heritage.’

Glass
predicted that parents will have their fetuses screened for a myriad of genetic
defects, and will abort those fetuses that are imperfect or will use gene
therapy to change the genes of their unborn children. He predicted that young people, at an age when their sperm and
eggs would be the healthiest, will store their gametes for use when they are
older. He predicted that embryos that
are especially desirable, because of their perfect genetic inheritance, might
be frozen for use by couples who want ideal babies, a process he called ‘embryo
adoption.’ And he had no serious qualms
about advocating these eugenic practices.
‘The Golden Age toward which we move will soon look tawdry as we no
longer see endless horizons. We must,
then, seek a change within man himself.
As he acquires more fully the power to control his own genotype and
direct the course of his own evolution, he must produce a Man who can transcend
his present nature,‘ he said.[xli]

Even Linus Pauling, the Nobel laureate from
California Institute of Technology, spoke unhesitatingly about using science to
improve the human race. In a paper
published in 1968 in the UCLA Law Review,
Pauling proposed in all seriousness that we tattoo the foreheads of people who
carried one copy of recessive, disease-causing genes so that they would not
accidentally have children with someone else who carried the same gene.[xlii] He explains:

It is my
opinion that legislation along this line, compulsory testing for defective
genes before marriage, and some form of public or semipublic display of this
possession, should be adopted.[xliii]

These humanists, eugenicists and secularists start
with the legal license to kill tiny
zygotes and forgotten frozen embryos
and end up proposing wholesale killing, sterilizing and cloning based on some self-consciousgnosis of utopian functionality.

American values have been seen as products of,
alternately, heavy dependence on the liberal tradition (with its emphasis on
individual self-determination and freedom) and a fundamental consensus on the
value of individual human life. Writes
Blank:

Social and
political institutions have proved remarkably resilient and adaptable, given
the diverse population and tradition of individualism; still, cultural
pluralism has produced a large number of potential lines of stress in society.[xliv]

These new technologies are bringing the old liberal
tradition, with emphasis on the “individual,” in conflict with “public
good.” In explaining the challenge of
developing governmental policies on the application of technology, Blank cites
Daniel Callahan:

It cannot handle
those problems where people with diverse values must work together to deal with
common problems, cannot create a necessary sense of trust which must undergird
community and cannot, in particular deal with those problems of technology
where, because of their implications and consequences are communal, the values
by which they are judged and controlled must be communal.[xlv]

The most committed proponents of direct genetic
intervention tend to be biologists and geneticists who focus their attentions
on human survival. Others are
humanists, certain religious sects (Raelians of CLONAID for example), and
others who uphold a utopian wish to perfect the species and society. Some scientists and secularists are like
Richard Dawkins, just “curious.” Key
proponents outside the scientific and religious communities are those of the
GBLTQ community. Some civil
libertarians and various members of GBLTQ declare an individual “right” to
reproductive self-determination.

Ignoring for the moment the problem of risk, another
large quandary remains - the ethical dilemma arising from the allocation of
constrained resources and coordination of the benefits in a less than perfect
scenario. A modest gauge of the
complications of implementing technological utopia is found in the history of
kidney dialysis. The medical ethics
movement had its roots in this era. The
problem was that dialysis machines were in short supply, so not everyone could
be saved. The question was, who should
live and who should die? According to
Kolata, the medical community in Seattle turned to a committee of volunteers to
make the choices:

The committee,
a group of upright citizens who later became known as a ‘God squad,’ earnestly
formulated the rules. They gave
priority to breadwinners, family men who were fine upstanding members of the
community. People who did not have a
job, those who seemed unstable or who lived in the margins of society, were
denied the lifesaving treatment. Men
were favored over women, married over single.[xlvi]

We like to believe that Nazi-style medical
experimentation on humans is rare and required fanatical if not psychopathic
doctors operating under sanction by an equally obsessive government. However, the treatment of humans as guinea
pigs or as disposable fetuses was historically only a matter of a slight
paradigm shift, where society moved from God-fearing to becoming God. We have seen how Margaret Sanger and
associated eugenicists developed a new, anti-Christian worldview, which
encouraged abortion, endorsed eugenic manipulation of societies for mankind’s
evolutionary good and proclaimed racial Darwinism. More recently, bioethicist Peter Singer was quoted declaring:

When the death
of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better
prospects for a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if
the disabled infant is killed.[xlvii]

Terry Golway quotes from Singer’s book Practical Ethics:

…the right to
life movement ‘is misnamed. Far from
having concern for life…those who protest against abortion but dine regularly
on the bodies of chickens, pigs and calves, show only a biased concern for the
lives of members of their own species.’ …‘I have
argued that the life of a fetus…is of no greater value than the life of a
nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality [and] self-consciousness…If
the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the
newborn baby does not either.’[xlviii]

Golway says Singer urges us to “put aside feelings
based on the small, helpless and-sometimes-cute appearances of human
infants.” Laboratory rats, after all,
are “innocent in exactly the same sense as the human infant.” According to Golway, Singer complains that
prohibitions against killing “deformed or sickly” infants are “a product of
Christianity.” Moreover, now that many
assume a post-Christian era, Singer says:

Perhaps it is
now possible to think about these issues without assuming the Christian moral
framework.[xlix]

In the last section of Chapter 8, we will see that
same-sex couples and elderly single female heterosexuals, wishing to overcome
inherent biological incompatibilities in their unions or singleness, do not
view biotechnology as negative, risky or morally wrong. Indeed, many gay and lesbian couples see
access to human cloning technologies as a fundamental human right, no different
than the current applications of fertility enhancements for heterosexual
married or co-habitating couples.

Not surprising, Alvin Toffler, a futurist, sums-up a
growing public phenomenon:

A lot of perfectly
fine and decent and humane people now think that technology is negative.[l]